The Diablo III Website announces Blizzard's plans to reinstate limits on the number of games a player can launch within a given time period to help curtail exploits and the use of bots. Here's a bit:

The use of bots not only impacts the stability of the game service, but it also has an impact on the player-driven economy. While we regularly take action against accounts for the use of unauthorized third-party programs and bots, this additional measure will help us further preserve and protect the integrity of the game and economy in between ban waves.

Once this change goes live, we're looking for your feedback to help ensure that the limit is working as intended. If you encounter the "Input limit reached" message and feel you should not have, please let us know how many games you were creating and why. This information will help us ensure the limit minimally impacts legitimate players while still protecting the game against bots.

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Flatline wrote on Jul 17, 2012, 16:12:And yeah, you can buy hats in TF2 which are purely cosmetic, but it's not generally understood/accepted that in the next 10 hours or whatever of playtime that you'll end up having to replace that hat because it's become obsolete.

That presupposes the idea that the drops aren't useless to begin with.

As for your SC2 "mission pack" comment in another post, I would hardly call Heart of the Swarm a mission pack. An entirely new single player campaign (which the Terran campaign was pretty well done in my opinion), and new units in multiplayer, which that alone means months and months of balancing work to be done. Keep in mind it also took Valve 2 years to release Episode 1, and it wasn't nearly the same size or scope of Half-Life 2 (as HoTS is to WoL). Blizzard kind of shot themselves in the foot though, it took them longer than Valve to realize that episodic content is a terrible development cycle to commit to.

So... we get... 6 new units say (2 for each faction?), or maybe 9 units total, and a bunch of single player missions.

Yeah, that's a mission pack. And might I humbly remind you that Brood Wars did the *exact* same thing as HOTS and came out almost one year to the day after Starcraft 1? And let's be further honest: Do you really think they started from scratch the day after they shipped SC2? Hardly. I'm sure HOTS started development at the tail end of SC2's development. While it's been 2 years since SC2 launched, I'd put money down that HOTS has been in dev for closer to 3 years.

And let's not kid ourselves, HOTS is *not* going to be balanced by any stretch of the means on launch day. It's going to get patched 10-12 times once it actually hits mainstream and gets beta tested by 10 million people, including professional gamers. Which means that year, year and a half of "balancing" that they're doing? Meaningless. The benefit will be surpassed in the first 90 days of the game's release.

Edit: And Valve has the same damn problem as Blizzard for releasing games "meh... whenever..." Holding up the disastrous cluster-fuck that is Half-life 2 episodes is hardly a vindication for Blizzard. Next you'll be using Duke Nukem Forever as an excuse for Blizzard being slower than shit.

But it'll still be a crap excuse because we have *excellent* benchmarks to hold Blizzard up against: Blizzard's own development history. After all, they're basically remaking the same 3 or 4 games over and over again now. Next up will probably be a minor graphical overhaul of Warcraft, due out in 2025.